Hardware Review

Das Keyboard Professional

Metadot’s Das Keyboard is really nothing new; their totally blank mechanical
keyboard for über-hackers has been on the market for a few years now, to
largely positive reviews. Someone must have pointed out that not everyone has
the entire QWERTY layout committed to muscle memory, though, because they’re
finally shipping a Das Keyboard with printed lettering: the Professional.

The Das Keyboard Professional’s piano-gloss finish classes up any desk,
but shows dust to an extreme degree.

The Professional is one of two new models from Metadot, the other being the
Ultimate, which replaces the Das Keyboard II. The only real difference between
the Professional and the Ultimate is the lettering: the Professional has it
and the Ultimate doesn’t. Unfortunately, the lettering is printed in a
bizarre, squarish, small-caps typeface that, for some reason, evokes bad 1980s
sci-fi movies. Presumably in the interest of saving money through the economy
of scale, the keys are printed in a typical Windows layout, including the
infamous Windows key between the space bar and the Alt key.

For some reason, Metadot chose to use a 1980s sci-fi B-movie font for the
key caps, most obvious on the larger keys.

There’s a two-port USB 2.0 hub built into the keyboard, although both ports
are on the far right end of the keyboard. Metadot isn’t going to win any
friends in the southpaw community with that, unless the lefties who buy this
keyboard have very long cords on their mice. The port location is also very
inconvenient for people who use USB memory sticks on a regular basis, as it
forces the mouse further outboard for right-handed users, making a greater
reach from the keyboard to the mouse. These ports should have been on the back
of the keyboard, just behind the “daskeyboard” logo.

Two USB ports are located on the far right side of the keyboard near the
back, ensuring left-handed mousers will be maximally frustrated.

The Num Lock, Caps Lock, and Scroll Lock indicators are very tastefully
done. Though they’re blue LEDs, and I’ve ranted before about how blindingly
bright many companies seem to think consumers want their blue LEDs these days,
Metadot has hidden them behind the gloss-black finish in such a way that they
are totally invisible when off, and present a subdued but clear glow when on.
Other hardware manufacturers should take a lesson from this subtle use of LED
illumination.

The Caps Lock indicator is illuminated with subtle blue LED light, in
stark contrast to most modern computer peripherals. As an added bonus,
it’s incredibly stylish and attractive.

All that is sort of secondary, however. Why would anyone spend $130 on a
keyboard that only has 104 keys? You can buy keyboards at any office
superstore that offer all sorts of additional features on top of the standard
104-key layout for a hundred bucks less. The answer, of course, lies in the
mechanism.

When personal computers were in their infancy back in the 1970s and 1980s,
keyboards were all made with mechanical keyswitches. Those of you who were
around then surely remember the loud typewriter-like clacking these mechanical
switches made. I suspect very few workplace stress experts lamented their
demise in the 1990s, as rubber-dome keyboards took over the market and lowered
the background noise in offices everywhere to a dull roar. Hardcore typists,
however, have consistently touted the superior action of the old-style
mechanical keyswitches. Apple’s old ADB-based Extended Keyboard and Extended
Keyboard II have a
cult following amongst Mac users, while the old PS/2-based IBM Model M
keyboards have a similar
following among Windows and Unix users.

Given that the mechanical action is pretty much the reason for spending that
kind of money on a keyboard, how does the Das Keyboard Professional stack up?
The overall action is very nice. Keypresses have obvious appeal to the tactile
and auditory senses, and the feel of the keyboard seriously puts to shame
anything Apple has made since the Apple Extended Keyboard II, along with most
third-party keyboards. (Keep an eye on ATPM for more mechanical keyboard
reviews in the near future.) I had been using an Apple Pro Keyboard as my
daily driver until the Das Keyboard arrived, and compared to the Das Keyboard,
I feel like the Apple keyboard is filled with molasses. While I can’t make any
quantitative statements about faster typing or reduced typos, it does feel
as though I’m typing faster and more accurately, although the improvement is
probably slight.

It’s been so long since I used an Apple Extended Keyboard regularly that
comparisons are nearly impossible, but the Das Keyboard Professional feels a
lot like I remember the old Apple keyboards did. The Apple keyboards sounded
better, though; they had a deeper, richer “thunk” to their action, whereas the
Das Keyboard’s sound is a much higher-pitched “click.” Both sound far superior
to any rubber-dome keyboard I’ve used.

Unfortunately, this otherwise excellent keyboard is saddled with several
frustrating quirks. Some are a product of its Windows-centric design, a
problem from which many third-party keyboards suffer, but the biggest is not.

The Web site claims “Mac
users can swap the command/control/options keys to match the Mac keyboard
layout using the Mac OS X keyboard control panel,” which is mostly true.
However, the Alt key on the right stubbornly insists on performing its default
action of Command, refusing to be re-mapped to anything else via the Keyboard
and Mouse preference pane. The left Alt key re-maps properly to Option. The
two Windows keys are easily re-mapped to Command to match the standard Mac
layout, but I very much miss having a working Option key on the right side of
the keyboard.

This necessity to swap layouts also puts laptop users in a bit of a pickle.
While the OS copes quite well with having a built-in laptop keyboard and an
external keyboard with two different layouts, it does not cope well with
switching between a standard Mac keyboard and the Das Keyboard Professional.
You need to open the Keyboard and Mouse preference pane and reset the mapping
each time you switch keyboards. Laptop users who use external keyboards both
at home and at the office will probably be best served by using identical
keyboards (or, at the minimum, keyboards with the same modifier key layout) in
both places to avoid this problem.

There is probably third-party software out there that will solve this problem
too, but when you’re spending $130 on a keyboard, you’re probably disinclined
to spend another $20–30 on software to make it work right.

The numeric keypad has a slightly different layout from the standard Mac
keyboard.

The Scroll Lock and Pause keys, located where F14 and F15 would normally be,
act as a brightness decrease and increase, respectively, just as F14 and F15
do on a standard Apple keyboard. While the Num Lock key has no visual cues to
indicate secondary function, it does function as a Clear key when using the
Calculator widget in Dashboard. Apple has traditionally printed “Clear” on
that key, with “Num Lock” as secondary text.

Like most non-Apple keyboards, the Das Keyboard Professional lacks
volume-control keys and an Eject key. Holding down F12 for a couple of seconds
substitutes for Eject, but after having easy-to-reach volume controls at hand
ever since my Wall Street PowerBook in 1998, I miss them terribly. Again, you
could use third-party software to re-map unused F-keys for this purpose, but
having actual volume-control keys would be much nicer.

The biggest problem with the keyboard is the Return (labeled “Enter”) key on
the main part of the keyboard. It very occasionally sticks in regular typing,
but certain ways that I type seem to trigger it much more often, possibly as
much as 10 percent of the time. This isn’t a big deal in some applications
(Adium, IRC clients, most Web browsers’ location or search fields), but it’s a
very big headache in others (filling out Web forms, e-mail, coding, word
processing). It’s tremendously frustrating when it happens, and it happens
enough to detract from the utility of the keyboard.

After spending most of an afternoon being driven crazy by this behavior,
seemingly exacerbated by high humidity such that it was happening as much as
50 percent of the time I hit the Enter key, I took the key cap off. Close
inspection of the mechanism under the key revealed two small wear marks where
the support wire was rubbing the inside front edge of the key cap. Filing a
small amount of material off the inside surface of the key cap where the wear
marks were located seems to have resolved the problem. I suspect either the
wire’s bend or the key cap itself was very slightly out of tolerance, causing
the cap to hang up on the support wire on its return stroke. The key switch
itself is not the least bit sticky.

The Das Keyboard Professional is a very good keyboard…for anyone but Mac
users. It’s acceptably good for most Mac users, and it’s certainly far
superior to most other Mac keyboards out there, but the type of people who
spend $130 on a keyboard are the type of people who would be exceedingly
bothered by this keyboard’s quirks. A dedicated Mac version with volume keys
and relocated USB ports would go a long way toward satisfying keyboard
connoisseurs.

Reader Comments (2)

I had the same key-mapping issue when I started using my unicomp customizer, (http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/customizer.html) which has an awesome mechanical key action.

However, I found that by changing the modifier key default keymappings and individual keyboard key mappings, and rebooting, I eventually got it to a state where the settings were retained when switching from one keyboard to the other.

You should experiment a bit with the settings; you may find that it will work for you after all.

i wish it had silent (read: LED-based, instead of buzzing lamps) keys glowing. It could be great accessory for usual notebook, short of USB2 ports, when you want to work on it tonight. Alas, in the whole world not such thing there is.

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